Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “You know,” the black money-maker began, “after you leave the Gold Coast, you mustn’t say anything that’ll hurt these people.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re getting along all right,” he assured me. “Many people don’t understand Africa. And we’ll be so hurt if people laugh at us—”

  “What do you want me to say about Africa?”

  “Tell ’em we’re getting along,” he said. “You can make money. These English boys here—they’re my friends—”

  “What kind of business are you in?”

  “Timber.”

  “What’s your attitude toward self-government?”

  “It’s all right, but—” He belched. “Look, what’s the use of making trouble always? We’re progressing fast….”

  “What do you call fast?”

  “Now, don’t take that attitude—!”

  “What attitude? I’ve only asked you a simple question.”

  He grew nettled, hostile. He rose and walked a few feet off and returned and sat again.

  “You want a drink?” he asked me.

  “All right.”

  “I asked you do you want a drink?” He was belligerent.

  “Sure. Okay. I’ll drink one with you.”

  The waiter brought over two scotch and sodas.

  “You don’t always know what you’re looking at,” he told me. His tiny red eyes glittered malevolently.

  “That’s true,” I said. I felt that he could have slit my throat without a single qualm.

  “Do you realize that these Englishmen wouldn’t be here in this town if it was not for me?”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “My family owns timber and cocoa farms here,” he said.

  “I see.”

  “Just because you meet me in a bar, drinking, don’t think that I don’t know what I’m doing,” he argued.

  “I’ve no doubt about your capacities,” I said.

  “Now, look,” he said. “Take these chiefs…I don’t give a damn about ’em. They say that they are masters of men. All right. How do they prove that they are masters? By letting men carry them on their shoulders. You ever see a palanquin? Four men carrying one man? Well, when four men are carrying you on their shoulders, that’s a visible sign that you are a master of men…. The world sees and knows that a man being carried like that is a master. Now, I’m no chief. I’m a businessman. How do I let the world know that I’m a master? I have a hundred men working for me. But they don’t carry me on their shoulders. Now, come here and let me show you something….”

  He rose and went to the door; I followed him. He drew aside a dirty, tattered curtain and pointed out into the rainy night.

  “See that car?” he asked me.

  At the edge of an open sewer ditch was a long black sleek car whose soft white and red lights gleamed in the wet darkness.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s my car. It’s a Jaguar.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. It was.

  “That’s my palanquin,” he told me. “Understand? I’ve got a hundred and fifty horsepower to carry me around. And these people round here, black and white, know I’m a master of men when they see me in that car…. I’m modern. I’m no chief with half-naked men sweating and carrying me on their shoulders….”

  “I get the point,” I said. I clapped him upon his back. “You know your way around.”

  We sat again; he sipped his drink and glared at me from under his eyelids.

  “You don’t always know who you’re talking to,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I agreed.

  “Have another drink.”

  “All right.” I didn’t want to offend him.

  Halfway through emptying his glass, he dozed, tilting the drink in his hand. I took the glass from his numbed fingers and set it softly on the table. He sagged against a wall, mumbling. Mr. Eccles passed and I signaled to let him know that I had had enough.

  “You don’t know who you’re looking at,” the black businessman mumbled.

  Well, he had made it. It was the first time I’d heard an African express his sense of how to make the transition from tribal life to the twentieth century, from tribalism to capitalism, from manpower to horsepower!

  With Kojo behind the wheel, I started out next morning in a downpour of rain for Kumasi. Leaving Koforidua, we plunged into deep jungle. Steadily we mounted the curving road with red earth and dark green vegetation flanking both sides of the car. The road slanted, dipped, lifted; at times, when I stared out of the rear window of the car, the undulating highway seemed like a bridge strung between high green poles. Mile after mile rain splashed against the car windows. Suddenly there were spots of sunshine and the jungle glittered evilly. The rain came again, then stopped. The metal inside the car breathed sweat. The backs of my hands were damp. When the rain stopped, moisture still formed on the car windows and Kojo had to turn on the windshield wipers in order to see the roadway. There was not much difference between rain and sun; moisture hung in the air in any case.

  The jungle reared thickly sixty feet into the air. Out of the virgin green, cottonwood trees jutted up like white sentinels. Drenched villages of mud huts, each with its rusty tin roof, flashed by. Along both sides of the road were droves of Africans walking in the rain, wearing those somber-colored cloths, black shoulders wet and bare, black breasts wet, uncovered, heads supporting huge piles of wood or charcoal or yams or cassava or vast calabashes of steaming kenke—walking barefooted with short, jerky, almost dainty steps. It was odd how they would stop suddenly in their tracks at the sound of the approaching car, leap nimbly into the muddy ditches at the side of the road, and stand immobile until the car had passed, their eyes staring bleakly…. Had they been conditioned to leap out of the way like that? Or were they simply afraid? And it was strange how the women always walked with the women, the girls with the girls, the men with the men, and the children with the children; they did not mix. African society seemed to divide, like unto like. They walked in single file, their naked feet barely lifting from the wet ground, their insteps flat, their necks straight, their shoulders square, their heads erect….

  Ahead the horizon was a stretch of blue mist and the rearing hills were half lost in the brooding clouds. Near Nkawkaw, some sixty-six miles from Kumasi, the jungle reached smack to the top of a tall mountain. The air was wet, sticky, yeasty. This earth and climate could grow anything; indeed, here man must wage an incessant battle against this vegetation in order not to be smothered by it. For two minutes the sun breaks through a rent in the sagging clouds, lighting up the drops of water on the palm leaves and jungle grass, and then, without warning, the world is plunged again into green gloom.

  I tried to imagine the state of life that existed here before the coming of the white man. According to R. S. Rattray, who interviewed aged Ashanti men and women during the 1920’s, there was little or no war among the widely scattered tribes. With the coming of the Europeans, the Ashanti began to dream of selling their slaves directly to the white men in the coastal forts, thereby avoiding the middlemen and augmenting their profits. They launched a series of crushing attacks upon neighboring tribes and conquered them and were on their way to building up a formidable kingdom when the combined forces of the coastal tribes and the British, in war after war, bled them white and laid them low….

  Before that, what…? Life was family life. When the head of the family died, he passed his authority on either to his younger brother or to his sister’s son, and his dying words of caution, advice, admonition were remembered and followed with a tenacity which today we can scarcely conceive of. The dead ancestor was buried under the floor of the hut and when the members of the family slept at night, he visited them in their dreams, reprimanding, cajoling, demanding, complaining. The belief that the other world was thronged with spirits was the order of the day.

  Yet, there was something inherently modest about these jungle children; theirs was a c
hastened and sober mood. The pre-Christian African was impressed with the littleness of himself and he walked the earth warily, lest he disturb the presence of invisible gods. When he wanted to disrupt the terrible majesty of the ocean in order to fish, he first made sacrifices to its crashing and rolling waves; he dared not cut down a tree without first propitiating its spirit so that it would not haunt him; he loved his fragile life and he was convinced that the tree loved its life also.

  So violent and fickle was nature that he could not delude himself into feeling that he, a mere man, was at the center of the universe. It was not until the meek and gentle Jesus came that he waxed that vain!

  Above all, the sight of blood exercised a magical compulsion upon the emotions of the Akan and does so to an inordinate extent even to this day. The monthly menstrual flow of women made them feel terror and dread, made them think that a child was struggling futilely to be born. The woman was believed to be the nexus of a battle between the visible and invisible worlds, and what man, in his right mind, would have sexual truck with a woman so involved with the dark and abysmal forces of a deified and polytheistic nature. And no doubt in those early days they lived a life of sexual communism, like so many other tribal people, and did not connect coitus with conception, and when a woman was menstruating or pregnant, she was a deadly creature whom one had better avoid—a tabooed being coming directly under the influence of the unseen…. Far, far back there must have been cults of moon worshipers among the women, for there are traces of moon images in their decorations and ornamentations even today. Silver is for women; silver symbolizes the moon; and does not the moon make the women bleed and pull the tides of the sea? On one of the trucks on a highway I saw a painted sign which proclaimed: FEAR WOMAN AND LIVE LONG….

  What symbols did they have in those bygone days, symbols of wood and iron which have long ago rotted in this hot and humid earth?—symbols whose forms and meanings flowed from an order of emotional logic forever lost to our minds and feelings? The ego felt continuously threatened by ghosts and goblins against which resistance had to be offered night and day. Food, and children to help to grow more food, were the crux of existence. Pray the ancestors to let us have more children so that there will be more hands to grow more food….

  People were valuable per se as people; indeed, they were a kind of currency; one could pawn one’s children, one’s nieces or nephews. You gave people in exchange for goods, in exchange for land; you gave people in exchange for other people; and, to own another person to help you with your daily chores was, of course, natural. When the West saw these pawns in the African households, they called them slaves and felt that these people would be fit to labor on the plantations in the New World.

  Arriving at Nkawkaw at midday, I ate, rested, went out upon the narrow veranda of the resthouse…. Emotionally detached, I feel the spell of this land. Those still, stagnant clouds snared in the tops of those tree-clad mountains—must not that have been an ominous sign in the old days? And that blood-red sun at sunset, what did it mean? That crawling line of ants, was it not pointing the way to a guilty man? Was not the veering flight of that bird the gesture of an unseen ancestor trying to communicate something? Why did the wind blow down that tree and make it point northward? That huge rock tilting at so strange an angle, what did it mean? And that child dying so young? Who did that…? What punishment was being visited and for whose sins?

  Night comes suddenly, like wet black velvet. The air, charged with too much oxygen, drugs the blood. The scream of some wild birds cuts through the dark and stops abruptly, leaving a suspenseful void. A foul smell rises from somewhere. A distant drumming is heard and dies, as though ashamed of itself. An inexplicable gust of wind flutters the window curtain, making it billow and then fall limp. A bird chirps sleepily in the listless night. Fragments of African voices sound in the darkness and fade. The flame of my candle burns straight up, burns minutes on end without a single flicker or tremor. The sound of a lorry whose motor is whining as it strains to climb the steep hill brings back to me the world I know.

  Thirty-Three

  These shy people of the mud villages seem to live lives extending more into space than into time. They are static; they move and have their being, but it’s a kind of being that bends back upon itself, rests poised there, settled…. For housing, they do not build a house; they erect a shelter. For food, they do not eat for taste, but from hunger, habit, from what they recall of what their fathers ate.

  There is not enough foundation to this jungle life to develop a hard and durable ego; more than ever do I know that that sudden burst of laughter which they give forth when my eyes meet theirs is acute embarrassment, a yearning to vanish, to have done with their personalities while someone is looking at them—a shyness that would fain give up and have no more dealings with strangers—a laughter that is so sweet of sound and yet so bitter in meaning. I look at a black child and it sinks right down upon the floor and hides its face, giggling. I look at a boy and he looks at me as though hypnotized, startled, awed, then he breaks into a wide, still, scared grin which he holds as he keeps staring at me, as though I’d put some kind of spell upon him. A black girl comes into a liquor store and when I glance at her, she pauses, smiles, gathers her cloth tightly about her, tucking and twisting it across her chest, bends in her knees, laughs, ducks her head, and moves forward in a shuffling and stumbling manner which keeps up until she vanishes around a corner; and her laughter is caught up and contagiously echoed by others who guffaw loud and long….

  The tribal mind is sensuous: loving images, not concepts; personalities, not abstractions; movement, not form; dreams, not reality…. Hence, institutions based upon royalty of blood are natural to that mind. Endow a thing or a person with a rolling, sonorous name, and the tribal African must needs feel that there is something noble about it. “Fine!” “A big, big man!” “I want a wonderful life!” “I like your emotion!” “I’d like to serve you.”: “I like you too much!”—all of these are phrases of full-bodied emotion, passion, joy as they roll from black lips. From a strictly tribal point of view, they cannot really conceive of a political party except in the form of a glamorous leader. When they honor, adore, obey it’s toward a person and it is absolute in its intensity. The tribal African does not really love, he worships; he does not hate, he curses; he does not rest, he sleeps; and when he works, his work becomes a kind of dance…. He transforms that which he touches into something else which is his and his alone; he dreams naturally, spontaneously, without even being aware that he does so. To live, with the tribal African, is to create.

  System is the enemy of the tribal mind; action proceeds on a basis of association of images; if feeling is absent, the tribal African mind is in doubt. There is something which is lord over him and there are things over which he would be a lord…. A chief whom I met casually could give me but a few moments of his time; as he shook my hand warmly, he told me:

  “I must go now. I must preside over a ceremony and I must make myself gorgeous for my people….”

  He meant that he was going to deck himself out in silk and gold…. The tribal African feels caught between greater and lesser powers, feeling that some are harmful and some are helpful. Hence, he evolves the notion of propitiation to aid him in controlling those powers. Since he likes to receive splendid gifts, he reasons that the spirits of rivers and trees and rocks and wind would also like to have gifts; and especially do the dead love gifts…. Imagine four hundred gods! Every possible combination of impulse and desire are projected and symbolized; the subjective and the objective melt; through ritual, man and nature fuse…. Jesus Christ? God number 401….

  But maybe the Africans are so biologically different that no matter what they are taught or what influences they are subjected to, their attitudes will remain unaltered. Is the African less adaptable than other races to change?

  In America anthropologists have long debated what is in academic circles referred to as “African survivals.” But when one si
ts in Africa and observes African people, the problem of “African survivals” takes on a new dimension and becomes possible of statement in terms that admit of a solution. The truth is that the question of how much of Africa has survived in the New World is misnamed when termed “African survivals.” The African attitude toward life springs from a natural and poetic grasp of existence and all the emotional implications that such an attitude carries; it is clear, then, that what the anthropologists have been trying to explain are not “African survivals” at all—they are but the retention of basic and primal attitudes toward life.

  The question of how much African culture an African retains when transplanted to a new environment is not a racial, but a cultural problem, cutting across such tricks as measuring of skulls and intelligence tests. Barring a racial prejudice which keeps the African at bay, he, when transplanted, identifies himself with the rational, urban, industrial (for whatever it’s worth!) order of things, and, to the extent that his basic apprehension of the universe is coincident with that of the Western environment in which he finds himself, he changes as would other human beings. In short, he remains black and becomes American, English, or French…. But, to the degree that he fails to adjust, to absorb the new environment (and this will be mainly for racial and economic reasons!), he, to that degree, and of necessity, will retain much of his primal outlook upon life, his basically poetic apprehension of existence.

  There is no reason why an African or a person of African descent—in America, England, or France—should abandon his primal outlook upon life if he finds that no other way of life is available, or if he is intimidated in his attempt to grasp the new way. (It must be said, however, that the African, in his effort to assimilate the Western attitude, starts from a point of reference that is not completely shared by the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, or other immigrants. The tribal African’s culture is primally human; that which all men once had as their warm, indigenous way of living, is his….) There is nothing mystical or biological about it. When one realizes that one is dealing with two distinct and separate worlds of psychological being, two conceptions of time even, the problem becomes clear; it is a clash between two systems of culture.